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An innovative essayist and his fact-checker do battle about the use of truth and the definition of nonfiction.

How negotiable is a fact in nonfiction? In 2003, an essay by John D’Agata was rejected by the magazine that commissioned it due to factual inaccuracies. That essay—which eventually became the foundation of D’Agata’s critically acclaimed About a Mountain—was accepted by another magazine, The Believer, but not before they handed it to their own fact-checker, Jim Fingal. What resulted from that assignment was seven years of arguments, negotiations, and revisions as D’Agata and Fingal struggled to navigate the boundaries of literary nonfiction.

This book reproduces D’Agata’s essay, along with D’Agata and Fingal’s extensive correspondence. What emerges is a brilliant and eye-opening meditation on the relationship between “truth” and “accuracy” and a penetrating conversation about whether it is appropriate for a writer to substitute one for the other.

Book Details

Paperback

February 2012

ISBN 978-0-393-34073-0

7 × 9.2 in
/ 128 pages

Sales Territory: Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Endorsements & Reviews

“...[H]ere is the genius of this little book, for as it progresses, D'Agata and Fingal turn everything around on us, until even our most basic assumptions are left unclear. Who says writers owe readers anything? Or that genre, such as it is, is a valid lens through which to consider literary work? ...[T]he book is "an enactment of the experience of trying to find meaning"— a vivid and reflective meditation on the nature of nonfiction as literary art.” — David L. Ulin, L.A. Times

“A fascinating and dramatic power struggle over the intriguing question of what nonfiction should, or can, be.” — Lydia Davis

“A singularly important meditation on fact and fiction, the imagination and life, fidelity and freedom. Provocative, maddening, and compulsively readable, The Lifespan of a Fact pulses through a forest of detail to illuminate high-stakes, age-old questions about art and ethics—questions to which the book (blessedly!) provides no easy answers.” — Maggie Nelson

“...The Lifespan of a Fact... is less a book than a knock-down, drag-out fight between two tenacious combatants, over questions of truth, belief, history, myth, memory and forgetting.” — Jennifer McDonald, New York Times Book Review

“A riveting essay delving into the arcane yet entertaining debate within the writing community over the relationship between truth and accuracy when writing creative nonfiction....” — Kirkus Reviews

“...Thus begins the alternately absorbing and infuriating exercise that is the book The Lifespan of a Fact, a Talmudically arranged account of the conflict between Jim Fingal, zealous checker, and John D’Agata, nonfiction fabulist, which began in 2005 and resulted in this collaboration.” — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York Times Magazine

“If you like compelling, emotional stories set in wild, business-friendly locales, this book delivers.” — Daniel Roberts, Fortune Magazine